And this is austerity? Central banks have trillions for speculation, none for people

In this new age of austerity money is a perpetual struggle for the public sector and ordinary people, writes Pete Dolack. Yet central banks have squandered trillions to boost profits in the financial sector, reward speculation and push up real estate values. In fact, the world is awash with money as never before - our money. Just don't expect to get your hands on it any time soon.

Instead of throwing money at speculators and banks, we could have wiped out student debt, fixed all the schools, rebuilt aging water and sewer systems, cleaned up contaminated industrial sites, repaired dams, and still have $700 billion left.

There's no money for schools, no money for social services, no money for the environment.

There is lots of money for speculators, however. A tsunami of money. Money that is measured in the trillions.

The central banks of the United States, Britain, the eurozone and Japan have so far spent US$6.57 trillion (or €6.06 trillion if you prefer) on 'quantitative easing' programs. And, for all of that incomprehensibly gigantic sum of money, what mostly has been accomplished is a stock market bubble.

And, as a secondary effect, a boost to real estate prices, making real estate speculation pay off a bit more than it ordinarily does.

Oh no, so much for the overall economy, you say? Hard to argue that point. The world's advanced capitalist countries are mired in stagnation, structural unemployment and widening inequality, with public investment starved and personal debt a monumental problem.

Surely those staggering sums of money could have been put to better use. We'll get to that in a moment, but first a quick accounting. Money spent on quantitative easing is as follows:

Federal Reserve: $4.1 trillion in three programs that ended in November 2014.

European Central Bank: €600 billion so far; the ECB has committed to spending a total of €1.1 trillion through March 2017.

Bank of England: £375 billion.

Bank of Japan: ¥155 trillion so far in two and a half years; the Japanese central bank is committed to spending ¥80 trillion per year with no ending date. (¥122 = $1)

QE is banks buying their own debt - at a premium

'Quantitative easing' is the technical name for central banks buying their own government's debt in massive amounts; in the case of the Federal Reserve it also bought mortgage-backed securities.

The supposed purpose of quantitative easing programs is to stimulate the economy by encouraging investment. Under this theory, a reduction in long-term interest rates would encourage working people to buy or refinance homes; encourage businesses to invest because they could borrow cheaply; and push down the value of the currency, thereby boosting exports by making locally made products more competitive.

Seeking assets with a better potential payoff, speculators buy stock instead, driving up stock prices and inflating a stock-market bubble. Money not used in speculation ends up parked in bank coffers, boosting bank profits, or is borrowed by businesses to buy back more of their stock, another method of driving up stock prices without making any investments.

Given that banks are bigger and more profitable than ever (the six biggest US banks racked up a composite net income of US$75 billion in 2014) and US corporations spend about $1 trillion per year buying stock to artificially boost stock prices, shoveling still more money to those with far more than can be spent or invested in any rational way is irrational, no matter how many reports are pumped out by think tanks they pay to tell them otherwise.

What else could we have done with it all?

So what might have been done with those quantitative easing trillions thrown at banks instead? The total student debt in the United States, where the costs of higher education has risen more than double the rate of inflation since 1982, is $1.3 trillion as of October 2015.

Printing the money to cover the entirety of the country's student debt would total less than one-third of what the Federal Reserve spent on inflating a stock-market bubble. That leaves many more needs to be addressed.

The infrastructure of the US is crumbling, and governments are short of money to fix what needs to be fixed. The investment needed to modernize and maintain school facilities is estimated to be at least $270 billion. The foreseeable cost of maintaining water systems in the coming decades in the US is estimated at $1 trillion.

The American Water Works Association arrives at this total by assuming each of 240,000 water main breaks per year would require the replacement of a pipe. Capital investment needs for wastewater and stormwater systems are estimated to require another $298 billion over the next 20 years.

The shortfall of funding to clean up Superfund sites is estimated to be as much as $500 million per year. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that one in four United Statesians lives within three miles of a hazardous waste site; more than 400,000 contaminated sites await cleanup. And we can throw in another $21 billion to repair the more than 4,000 dams deemed to be deficient by the Association of State Dam Safety Officials.

Jobs instead of speculation

Add up all of the above and we would have spent a total of $3.4 trillion. Instead of throwing money at speculators and banks in the vain hopes they would spend the money productively instead of pocketing it or directing it toward speculation or boosting stock prices, we could have wiped out all student debt, fixed all the schools, rebuilt aging water and sewer systems, cleaned up contaminated industrial sites and repaired dams, and still have $700 billion more to spend on other needs.

If we were to apply that remaining $700 billion to create a federal jobs program, such as was done during the Great Depression, a total of 14 million jobs paying $50,000 and lasting one year could have been created, or three and a half million jobs paying that salary and lasting four years. That is in addition to all the people who could be put to work performing necessary infrastructure repair work if the above projects were carried out.

All of that for no more money than the Federal Reserve threw away on quantitative easing. This same argument can be made elsewhere: The British think tank Policy Exchange estimates Britain's needs for investment in transportation, communication and water infrastructure to be a minimum of £170 billion. That is less than half of what the Bank of England spent on its quantitative-easing scheme, and dwarfs an estimated £2.5 billion deficit in the National Health Service.

Instead of spending this money on programs that would put people to work and enable them to get on their feet financially, those with more get more. European non-financial companies are estimated to be sitting on $1.1 trillion in cash, or more than 40 per cent higher than in 2008, the Financial Times reports.

The St. Louis branch of the Federal Reserve estimates that, in 2011, US corporations were sitting on almost $5 trillion of cash, a total likely to have increased.

This is what class warfare looks like, when only one side is waging it.

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